Reality, “Fiction” and Psychorealising the Fictive

Author: Kayode Olla, The Federal Polytechnic, Ede, Nigeria
Email: kayodeolla@gmail.com
Published: June 05, 2020
https://doi.org/10.22492/ijah.7.1.08

Citation: Olla, K. (2020). Reality, “Fiction” and Psychorealising the Fictive. IAFOR Journal of Arts & Humanities, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.22492/ijah.7.1.08


Abstract

Readers of literature, listeners of music, appreciators of visual art – indeed, all recipients or “audiences” in any form of the creative and performance arts – do sometimes connect with the artistic work on a deeply personal and subjective level when the work strikes a relatable chord in them. Audiences tend to find themselves and their everyday reality mirrored, or “place-able,” in the work’s creative or enacted reality. This subjective experience has been termed “Psychofictive Reality”. This article proposes this concept through the prism of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic concepts of Internal/External Realities and Aristotle’s dramatic notion of Catharsis. It establishes key notions such as Artistic Reality, Psychic-Material Reality and Mirrorness/Relatability, in the concept of Psychofictive Reality.

Keywords: archetypes, realism, catharsis, subjectivity, Sigmund Freud, psychic reality